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Harbour

Recently I was chosen together with a couple of other photographers to be part of Hamburg’s container port anniversary. It’s been fifty years of highly technologized globalization! Yay for Hamburg!

The marketing department contacted @igershamburg to select photogs and we met at the Terminal Burchardkai for an extended behind the scenes tour of the port. And boy, what a tour it was! We went up to a container gantry crane, where the star warsian driver’s cab is located a lofty 50m above ground. Initially I thought that the technology is simply kind of brutish, a lot of steel and heavy engines with little sophistication. Wrong I was!

Each crane is stuffed with a datacenter of its own, so that the whole process of unloading the containerships is gaplessly connected to the ordering party and obviously the logistics centre that is in situ at the terminal.

For me personally, I was quite overwhelmed by the shapes, sizes and primariness (if that’s a thing) of the colors and honestly struggled to get interesting shots, even though it was enormously interesting to me personally. I do hope that you like the images, though.

The other day I went on a photowalk with Yang (check him out on Instagram here). We decided on doing some long exposure stuff around the harbour, Hafencity and Speicherstadt and when we met a surreal south wind blew us all around and it was an incredible 13 Celsius in January! I forgot my tripod mount for the camera at home, so initially I felt challenged by the situation and decided to rise to the occasion, so I set my ISO up to 3200 accepted the grain for the creative effect it is really not and went ahead. The grain that is there now is simulated film grain over heavily denoised impages. Yang was better prepared and pushed ahead with his images and we walked around. As I am not really at home with architecture I kept close to him and some of my images are heavily inspired by what he did minutes earlier (only with more grain and less badda-bumm). So be it. It was a fun outing, though and I hope we will see to another one, soon.

Lately I’ve been walking around late at night and made some images that exemplify what Hamburg looks at night. Here’s a collection of the quieter and more bustling sites along the Elbe all taken with long exposures, so that it’s the movement of the machines, not the humans that gets the focus. I guess I’ll be working on this a lot more in the future, so a part II will come (whenever that is). Enjoy!

Today, some friends took me out to the Elbphilharmonie to make some images. A beautiful, icy-cold and bright winter-day persuaded me quickly to join them. We were not alone. That is actually the reason why there are only a handful of pics in here today, there are quite some more nice images on my hard-drive, but they usually have some person who is tack-sharp in the frame and I shy away from publishing pictures of strangers that I haven’t asked for their image.

Claus and Marion took me to Hamburg’s Harbour Museum, which is a registered society that buys, mends and of course displays important objects of the harbour’s technical past. There is a stunning assortment of exhibits that speak to the history of the harbour and we enjoyed a tour of the freight-ship „Bleichen“ (more on that in a later post).

My summer vacation this year took me to Laboe, Schleswig-Holstein. It’s a small vacation-spot right at the Baltic Sea. My hotel is located right there, near the Marine-Memorial. On this first day I took stroll along the beach, taking in how relaxed everyone was. I shall be relaxed one of these days as well. A special treat is that my parents stay only some kilometres away taking a regimen. So here you see them, smiling quite contently at Laboe’s harbour.

There is not much to say about this. I usually do not shoot boats, so I felt rather unfamiliar making pictures of them (they are obviously not zoo animals 😀 ). Nevertheless, there are always some images that are better than the rest, which are bundled here. Anyway, it was more a day out with Katharina than anything else, so I call this blog »snapshots«. Enjoy.